skip to content

← back to the plays

independence6 unconnected
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

8 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2015-06-19 → 2022-05-07

6 builders who never spoke to each other

Narrow the category until you are its only occupant

Keep shrinking the description of what you sell until no rival is standing in the same square, then stop competing and start being the obvious answer. The cost is a smaller addressable market and the payoff is that the people in it have no equivalent option, which is what makes a small company legible at all.

The method

  1. 01

    Keep narrowing the category description until you are the only occupant of it, then compete against nobody.

  2. 02

    Stand for one narrow idea and refuse to pretend you are several things; that limitation is what branding actually is.

  3. 03

    Differentiate by limitation: commit to one niche or one feature instead of serving everyone, because being summarisable in a line is what makes you memorable.

  4. 04

    When you cannot get traction in a crowded category, narrow to one niche and serve it better than any competitor can.

  5. 05

    Niche down inside an already narrow field, to a specific set of features in one product, because the leads that arrive are then pre-qualified and the pre-sales stage shrinks or disappears.

What it returned

  • K-SWISS moved from athletic footwear, to tennis, to heritage tennis, and finally to being the one American heritage tennis brand, which took it out of competition with Nike and Adidas.

  • no name stands only for refusing superficiality

  • Marketing Examples applied this by publishing only examples, with no agency or job board attached

  • Five years in he could not get traction among a paralysing number of email platforms; refocusing on a narrow creator niche produced meaningful traction within a year

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.

More in positioning

all positioning plays

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.